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The Dude Plumbs His Weary Soul

Jeff Bridges, the star of “Crazy Heart” and an Academy Award nominee for best actor.Credit
Matt Sales/Associated Press

AT some point on the road to screen immortality, in between pining for Cybill Shepherd in “The Last Picture Show” and hurting for Maggie Gyllenhaal in “Crazy Heart,”Jeff Bridges transformed from an all-American pretty boy with effortless charm to a weathered veteran with bottomless soul. It has been a gradual metamorphosis, sweet and bitter and eagerly observed by critics, who, as the years passed, kept angling for audiences (and studio executives) to get up to speed. “He is still waiting for the big hit that will finally transform his career,” Newsweek declared of Mr. Bridges in 1984, upon the release of “Starman,” in which he played an extraterrestrial. A decade later, and the one after that, he was still waiting.

Not that he ever seemed to mind. This is as it should be for a no-sweat star who might now be best known for his turn as the Dude — or “His Dudeness. Or Duder. Or, you know, El Duderino” — the middle-age stoner in the Coen brothers’ 1998 comedy “The Big Lebowski.” His Bridges-ness has been called “the Zen-ist of all actors” by his friend the musician T Bone Burnett, who helped create the music Mr. Bridges performs as Bad Blake in “Crazy Heart.” As Bad, a black-hatted country musician with a booze-pickled liver, he eases into a lovely groove, plucking at pain, strumming self-pity (“I used to be somebody/But now I am somebody else”), in a turn that has resonated with critics and will probably also play well at the Oscars.

“Crazy Heart” is an ingratiating, achy-heartbreaky male weepie (that black hat soon makes way for white) stuffed with pretty-as-a-postcard landscape shots and toe-tapping tunes. The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye in the film, but it has its truths, including the music and Mr. Bridges generously felt performance, which brings you into the story and keeps you there. Working at a lower register, he adds plenty of gravel to his vocal performance, so that you can hear all the cigarettes, booze and late nights in Bad’s voice as vividly as you see them in the gut that spills over his belt.

The movie is nowhere near crazy enough, which makes it safe Academy Award fodder. No matter. Mr. Bridges has put in the time, including as a nominee. He first attracted Oscar’s attention for his breakout role in “The Last Picture Show,” Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 elegy about a dying Texas town in the 1950s, only to lose to his co-star Ben Johnson, a veteran who had ridden for John Ford. Mr. Bridges was also nominated for best supporting actor for “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” (1974), losing to Robert De Niro in “The Godfather Part II,” and again in 2001 for “The Contender,” losing to Benicio Del Toro in “Traffic”. Nominated for best actor for “Starman,” he lost that one to F. Murray Abraham in “Amadeus.”

All these Bridges performances had something to recommend them, but over the years most of his best work has been in smaller, even forgotten titles, like “Cutter’s Way,” a 1981 drama about three friends from the director Ivan Passer. Like many of Mr. Bridges’s finest features, it did not attract masses of love or money, musts in the Oscar calculus. His persuasive turn as the bluntly named Richard Bone, a tarnished golden boy who lives off women and becomes involved in a mystery, probably didn’t help. Unlike his friend Cutter (John Heard), the one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged Vietnam veteran, Bone represents the generation that stayed home. “Richard Bone,” says Cutter, ”doing what he does best: walking away.” Fully bodied and wholly alienated, Bone finally does rise to the occasion, but he scarcely saves the day.

In an earlier age, say, that of his father, Lloyd Bridges, a character actor perhaps best remembered for his 1950s television series “Sea Hunt,” Jeff Bridges might not have had the chance to explore such ambiguities. Unlike his father and actor-brother, Beau, he was built to play heroes. But he comes into the movies in the 1970s, when the battles over Vietnam were raging in Southeast Asia and the United States and the old certainties were rapidly giving way to new doubts. Many of the best American films of this era were richly contradictory and shaded by dark thoughts and characters, not just ravishing technique. These were films, to borrow a wonderful phrase from the critic Robin Wood, which “seem to crack open before our eyes.”

Whether by inclination, agent representation, luck or just the fashions of the day, Mr. Bridges has largely gravitated away from the heroic. He first shows up in the movies as a baby in a 1951 drama, “The Company She Keeps,” alongside his brother and their mother, the actress Dorothy Dean. Two decades later he joins movie history as Duane, the bewildered high school football captain who necks at the movies with Ms. Shepherd’s heartbreaker in “The Last Picture Show.” Wounded, a little lost, Duane set the template for a Bridges type who was down on his luck and maybe skimming bottom, at times with a smile that looked far too innocent for an actor who soon made a habit of quietly taking over his films.

Photo

As the down-and-out country singer Bad Blake in “Crazy Heart,” for which the actor has earned an Oscar nomination.Credit
Lorey Sebastian/Fox Searchlight Pictures

In the early and mid 1970s he played a wide-eyed boxer, a sly con artist, a moonshiner turned car racer, a squealer turned suicide, a thief and a cattle rustler, working with veterans like John Huston (“Fat City” in 1972) and newcomers like Michael Cimino, who, for his 1974 debut, directed Mr. Bridges alongside Clint Eastwood in the crime story “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.” The critics had started to pay attention. “Sometimes, just on his own,” Pauline Kael wrote of his performance as a stock-car racer in “The Last American Hero” (1973), “Jeff Bridges is enough to make a picture worth seeing.” Notably, she also compared him to Robert De Niro, who was about to set fire to screens in Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets.”

“He probably can’t do the outrageous explosive scenes that Robert De Niro brings off in ‘Mean Streets,’ ” she wrote. “But De Niro — a real winner — is best when he’s coming on and showing off. Jeff Bridges just moves into a role and lives in it — so deep in it that the little things seem to come straight from the character’s soul.”

But in the 1970s male actors didn’t necessarily earn the juiciest parts for going deep on the little things, as suggested by the ascendancy of Mr. De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, James Caan and Dustin Hoffman, among others, who had nuance but also volume. The era’s most enduring heroes were obsessed and often obsessive, given to railing at diner waitresses and their own lovers, robbing banks and waving around guns, screaming at one another and alone in existential solitude. Their outsize pain did not make an obvious fit for Mr. Bridges. His age helped explain his roles, though it’s a good guess that his California surfer looks were a factor, especially since Robert Redford had a lock on that type for much of the decade.

In the 1980s American cinema was dominated by the logic of the blockbuster and cartoons of masculinity so uncomplicated they were known by their first names: Arnold, Sly, Bruce and Mel. These were not easy times for Mr. Bridges, whose early entry into high-concept terrain had been the 1976 “King Kong,” a widely perceived flop made in the wake of the “Jaws” juggernaut. He made it out unscathed, going on to survive “Heaven’s Gate” (1980). In 1982 he made the science-fiction film “Tron” while “E.T. The Extraterrestrial” topped the charts and “Blade Runner” changed the genre. That same decade, he starred in a slick, sexed-up thriller, except this one was a yawn (“Jagged Edge”), not a pop-cultural shocker (“Fatal Attraction”).

Yet by the late 1980s Mr. Bridges began a run of work that continued into the next decade, making some of the best and most warmly received films of his career. “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” (1988), Francis Ford Coppola’s frantically upbeat stealth tragedy about the eponymous 1940s automaker, earned the director and his star critical love. The romancing continued with “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (1989), Steve Kloves’s appealing romantic standard about lounge musicians that brought the Bridges brothers together for an emotional ménage à trois with Michelle Pfeiffer. The actress and her clingy dress received most of the attention, but Jeff Bridges, as a jazz pianist who has been wasting his talent in dives was its truer star. His disappointed men were human, not filmmaking conceits.

In the 1990s the roles became more consistently worthy or at least consistently decent. The higher-profile titles included Terry Gilliam’s “Fisher King” (1991), in which Mr. Bridges, as a shock jock, held off the nattering inundations of Robin Williams, and “Fearless,” Peter Weir’s 1993 psychodrama in which Mr. Bridges plays an architect who catches a case of grandiosity after a plane crash. Whatever their merits, these titles resonate less memorably, then as now, than the pair that bracketed the decade, starting with Martin Bell’s unassuming drama “American Heart” (1993), in which Mr. Bridges, as an ex-con struggling to be the father he never had, has rarely looked more beautiful or been more devastatingly touching.

The second film was, of course, “The Big Lebowski,” the blissful comedy that, after being dismissed by critics on its release, has materialized into a cult phenomenon, celebrated in an annual event called Lebowski Fest and consecrated by the predictable academic studies. Whether shuffling around in a bathrobe or dropping a lighted joint in his lap, Mr. Bridges’s timing is brilliant. But it’s his ability to convey a profound, seemingly limitless sense of empathy that elevate the Dude beyond the usual Coen caricature. By facing every assault — repeated beatings, a friend’s death, the theft of a rug — with little more than an exclamation (“Man!”) and a toke, he and the Dude affirmed that an American hero doesn’t need a punch, just a punch line, something that Judd Apatow’s merry band of potheads know well.

In some respects “The Big Lebowski” was Mr. Bridges’s “Raging Bull,” a defining movie. He never established a long working relationship with a director as Mr. De Niro did with Martin Scorsese. Mr. Bridges has worked with significant filmmakers, just not necessarily in their finest hour. He has made questionable choices, but he has had a breadth of roles that should be the envy of most, and a depth few achieve. And he has staying power. It takes nothing away from his work in “Crazy Heart” to note that the film’s success and profile probably owe something to “Iron Man,” the 2008 blockbuster in which he pulled a Lex Luthor to play the villain and which gave him his highest-profile role in years. He was hilarious, absurd, necessary, and to watch him in that movie as well as in “Crazy Heart” is to be reminded yet again of how he abides.

A version of this article appears in print on February 28, 2010, on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Dude Plumbs His Weary Soul. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe